3 Latest News Breaks in Emerging Tech

Corinna Underwood has been a published author for more than a decade. Her non-fiction has been published in many outlets including Fox News, CrimeDesk24, Life Extension, Chronogram, After Dark and Alive.

Swiss researchers at the EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) have developed a robot that can see objects thrown at it and reach out and grasp them. The robotic arm is 1.5 meters long. It has seven joints and a four-fingered hand. Its built-in cameras give it “vision,” and its computer produces a mathematical model of the object’s projected course. The robot is able to rapidly change position to grab hold of the object, such as a water bottle or ball. The team, headed by Ashwini Shukla, a researcher at the EPFL, have taught the robot how to reach in several directions and co-ordinate its arm and fingers. They hope that the robot will be of use retrieving debris in space.

The First DIY Cyborg

RoboRoach, from Backyard Brains is the first DIY cyborg kit. Designed for college students, the kit is designed to implant three adult cockroaches. Included in the setup is a printed circuit board with a built-in Bluetooth wireless transmitter/receiver, which allows you to communicate with it via your smartphone. Also included are LED indicator lights, resistors and capacitors, and a small cell battery, and three electrodes to complete the implantation. The three electrodes are intended to be implanted in each antenna and one for the ground (anywhere in the roach’s body). Once the electrodes are implanted in the roach’s antennae, a neural interface is created. As you send signals via the electrodes, you can control the roach’s movement.

‘Iron Man’ Suit Designed for Special Forces

Within just a few years, special operations forces within the United States may be using exoskeleton suits like the one seen in the Iron Man movie. Prototypes of the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) will be shown to commanders at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa this July. The suit is designed to monitor the wearer’s vital signs and battlefield information in real time. It will also give the wearer head-to-toe, bullet-proof protection. One of the biggest hurdles in the suit design so far is to make it light, comfortable and not too hot for the wearer.

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Imagine the convenience of being able to measure your household's use of water, find out why your smoke alarm is going off when you’re not home or check your insulin level, all with an app on your smartphone.

Engineers at a Georgia Tech laboratory have created a robotic arm that can be attached to amputees, enabling the technology to be embedded into the human body. The robotic arm has motors that can power to drumsticks. The first drumstick is manipulated by the musician's arms and electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. The second stick is tuned into the music being played and is able to improvise.

According to Palmer Luckey, founder of the renowned OculusVR, the future of neurogaming is practically upon us. Neurogames involve a combination of technologies that incorporate the player's nervous system into the game itself. The technology may include items such as EEG headsets, brain wave sensing and eye movement tracking devices and heart rate monitors. Throw virtually augmented reality into the mix, and you have a fully immersive gaming experience previously impossible. Developers of PrioVR just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to produce a full body tracking suit, which enables a gamer to explore a virtual world.

One of the latest trends in the arena of mechanobiology is a micro-pump designed to autonomously deliver insulin in response to an individual’s glucose levels. Developed by Samudra Sengupta and his team of associates from Pennsylvania State University, the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, the device is self-powered and is capable of the autonomous delivery of small proteins and molecules in response to biological stimuli, according to phys.org.

The Pip-Boy 3000 is a wearable wrist computer that looks like it came straight out of a video game, and in fact, it did. The device was inspired by the Fallout series of video games. A team of Reno Hackers—Ashley Hennefer, Colin Loretz, Christopher Baker, Andrew Warren and Ben Hammel—created the cuff device for NASA's space wearables competition, part of the International Space Apps Challenge 48-hour hackathon.

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